This study merged high-resolution spatial analyses of environmental stressors with mapping of ecosystem services for all five Great Lakes. Current restoration efforts have targeted high-stress sites almost exclusively, but generally without knowledge of the full range of stressors affecting these locations or differences among sites in service provisioning. An environmental stress map was developed by a binational team of researchers from academia and environmental organizations, known as the Great Lakes Environmental Assessment and Mapping (GLEAM) project. Results demonstrate that joint spatial analysis of stressors and ecosystem services can provide a critical foundation for maximizing social and ecological benefits from restoration investments.

How healthy are our oceans?
with Dr. Ben Halpern, Director, Center for Marine Assessment and Planning
Thursday, December 13, 5:30-6:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time)
Basement auditorium, 735 State Street, Santa Barbara
This event is free and open to all.
The talk will also be broadcast live on the internet.

A study published in Global Change Biology finds an invasive grass species may be one reason fires are bigger and more frequent in certain regions of the western United States. Results demonstrate that cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) invasion has substantially altered the regional fire regime. Although this result has been suspected by managers for decades, this study is the first to document recent cheatgrass-driven fire regimes at a regional scale.

Assessing the ecological importance of clouds has substantial implications for our basic understanding of ecosystems and for predicting how they will respond to a changing climate. This study was conducted in a coastal Bishop pine forest ecosystem that experiences regular cycles of stratus cloud cover and inundation in summer. The study concludes that clouds are important to the ecological functioning of these coastal forests, providing summer shading and cooling that relieve pine and microbial drought stress as well as regular moisture inputs that elevate plant and microbial metabolism.

Malaria transmission models to date assume constant or linear responses of mosquito and parasite life-history traits to temperature, predicting optimal transmission at 31 °C. These models are at odds with field observations of transmission dating back nearly a century. This study ‘s model, which includes empirically derived nonlinear thermal responses, predicts optimal malaria transmission at 25 °C (6 °C lower than previous models). Moreover, the model predicts that transmission decreases dramatically at temperatures > 28 °C, altering predictions about how climate change will affect malaria. Using these more accurate nonlinear thermal-response models will aid in understanding the effects of current and future temperature regimes on disease transmission.

The NCEAS team of Kappel and co-PIs Ben Halpern and Kimberly Selkoe — with partners at Stanford’s Center for Ocean Solutions, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — have been awarded $3.1 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for the soon-to-launch study, “Ecosystem Thresholds and Indicators for Marine Spatial Planning.” This four-year project will explore ecological and socio-economic thresholds or “tipping points” in marine ecosystems, and develop tools that help managers use this information to make better decisions about how people interact with and use those ecosystems.

A new article in PLoS ONE uses social network theory to study global interactions in coral reefs using social networks. Reefs are built up over thousands of years by hard corals with the help of their symbiotic partner, Symbiodinium, a single-celled algae that lives within the coral tissue – a symbiont. The study found that most corals have very few Symbiodinium partners, but that a handful of corals have many symbionts. This was important because it’s generally believed that most corals have few symbiont options to choose from. The study also found that transmission mode was important in these communities: young corals get their Symbiodinium from their parents or from the environment, but not both. Symbiodinium types were usually passed on through only one of these strategies, nearly dividing the networks in half. This research is important to understanding basic interaction patterns between corals and Symbiodinium. With a greater understanding of this important mutualistic interaction, we’ll be better equipped to protect coral reef communities – and the species they support.

From the many millions who count on ocean fisheries for their livelihoods to the uncounted lives saved by intact coral reefs during the 2004 Asian tsunami, people all over the world depend upon healthy oceans. But how healthy are our oceans? A new measurement tool, the Ocean Health Index, answers that question for every coastal country in the world. The Index goes far beyond just the "pristineness" of the world's oceans to measure the overall benefits people are receiving from the oceans.

Seafood is essential for human welfare the world over, as a source of nutrition and as a source of employment. The production of seafood also plays an outsized role in the health of coastal and marine ecosystems, with the two traditional seafood categories (fished or farmed) having very different impacts on the environment. Increasingly though, these two types of seafood production are blurring together. As a consequence, in a study published in the journal Marine Policy, marine researchers call for the use of a third "hybrid" category of seafood production. As seafood production methods shift, the use of this hybrid category should assist policymakers that are attempting to balance human welfare with environmental protection. This study stemmed from a NCEAS working group focussed on globally sustainable seafood and marine ecosystem restoration.

In response to the growing need for a way to easily access and analyze massive amounts of heterogeneous data in the fields of earth and environmental sciences, UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a core partner in a joint effort to streamline such research, presents DataONE, the Data Observation Network for Earth.

Far more wild plant species may be responding to global warming than previous large-scale estimates have suggested. It follows a detailed NCEAS working group study, released in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study shows that many plant species, which appear to not be affected by warmer spring temperatures, are in fact responding as much to warmer winters.

Utilizing and synthesizing data from nearly 200 published articles, NCEAS researchers examined the effects of various environmental stressors on plant growth and decomposition, two crucial processes in any ecosystem. They measured the rate of species loss in different ecosystems, and found that where there was greater plant species loss, there was an increased negative impact on plant growth and an alteration in decomposition. The effects of biodiversity loss on biomass were similar to the effects from other environmental stressors, including global warming, pollution, and acid rain.

An NCEAS working group found that experiments may dramatically underestimate how plants will respond to climate change in the future. Their findings, published in Nature, indicate that shifts in the timing of flowering and leafing in plants due to global warming appear to be much greater than estimated by warming experiments. As a result, species could change far more quickly than such studies suggest, possibly affecting water supplies, pollination of crops and ecosystems.

Upon the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, a national panel of researchers offers a new model for understanding what happened in this disaster, how to think of such events in the future, and why existing tools were inadequate to fully predict what lay before them. The findings of the NCEAS' "Ecotoxicology of the gulf oil spill: A holistic framework for assessing impacts" working group are published in the May issue of BioScience.

NCEAS researchers report in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that almost 70 percent of the most damaging non-native forest insects and diseases currently afflicting U.S. forests arrive via imported live plants. Once introduced, some of these imported insects and disease organisms establish, and a fraction become major economic pests. The authors describe several possible means to increase bio-security, including intensified efforts at plant inspection stations, precautionary measures that restrict plants from entering the U.S. until risks have been assessed, expanding post-entry quarantines, developing better advance knowledge about pest insects and pathogens, and developing integrated systems approaches that depend on expanded partnerships between researchers and industry.

A new study published in Landscape Ecology evaluates the ways that spatial uncertainty, landscape characteristics, and genetic stochasticity interact to influence the strength and variability of conclusions about landscape-genetics relationships.

"Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight
Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters and Disease" explores security challenges we face, and shows us how we might learn to respond more effectively to the unknown threats lurking in our future. The main premise of the book is that natural organisms have learned to thrive in an unpredictable and risk filled planet without having the power to plan, predict, or try to perfect themselves.